1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention is in the field of printer systems and, more particularly, methods and techniques for debugging printer system problems.
2. History of Related Art
In the field of high-speed printer systems, debugging most field problems generally requires the use of a customer service engineer. The engineer would generally travel to the customer's site to obtain a trace of the printer job that produces a particular problem. There are several drawbacks to this method of performing analysis and debug of a printer system.
It is generally slow and expensive to send an engineer to the site of every customer with a printer system problem. Moreover, the techniques employed by customer service engineers to obtain printer job traces have multiple problems.
Host traces and sniffer traces are generally very large. Moreover, recreating a printer job from a host trace or sniffer trace requires significant personnel resources. In conventional approaches to debugging printer systems, printer job data was captured on a laptop computer connected to the printer system via serial cable. Other approaches have employed specially built hardware to capture printer job data to a floppy disk. This data was then sent to a simulator that partially mimicked the printer behavior.
The existing techniques for capturing and analyzing printer jobs are insufficient. The printer simulators are generally unable to perform fully all of the functions of the printer system such as finishing operations, duplexing, and the like. In addition, capturing printer job traces out of a serial port requires a modification of printer microcode that could cause an alteration in the printer behavior. The use of a serial port to transmit large amounts of data can have a significant impact on the performance of the printer system and possibly alter the print and network environment with a possible loss of data. Significantly, a real printer cannot execute the printer trace obtained in this manner. In addition, the printer job trace generally has sensitive or confidential information that is not germane to the printer problem under analysis and which the customer is not anxious to divulge.